The Broken God

‘Aha, ho, I should thank you for decorating this carpet with the essence of your pain. And my mother would thank you, too – she wove it from the hair of her body.’

Danlo looked down at the carpet’s beautifully woven black and white birds, now swimming in his vomit. Birds shouldn’t be made to swim, he thought, and he was desperate to undo what had happened.

‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Old Father said gently. ‘As I’ve explained, Fravashi have no disgust of the body’s orifices, or of what occasionally emerges from them. We’ll leave this to dry, as a reminder.’

More insanity, Danlo thought, and he suddenly was dying to flee this insanity, to flee homeward to Kweitkel where his found-mother would make him bowls of hot blood-tea and sing to him while she plucked the lice from his hair. He wanted this journey into insanity to be over: he wanted the world to be comfortable and make sense again. He knew that he should flee immediately from the room, yet something kept him kneeling on the carpet, staring into Old Father’s beautiful face.

‘Now it begins,’ he said to Danlo, and he smiled. He was the holiest of holy sadists, but in truth he was also something else. ‘Who’ll show a man just as he is? Oh ho, the glavering, the glavering – try to behold yourself without glavering.’

Danlo touched the white feather bound to his dishevelled black and red hair. In his dark blue eyes there was curiosity and a terrible will in the face of falling madness. He felt himself becoming lost in uncertainty, into that silent morateth of the spirit that he had always looked away from with dread and despair. A sudden chill knowledge came into him: It was possible that all that he knew was false, or worse, arbitrary and quaint. Or worse still, unreal. All his knowledge of the animals and the world, unreal. In this insane City of Light, it very well might be impossible to distinguish the real from what was not. At least it might be impossible for a boy as ignorant and wild as he. He still believed, though, that there must be a way to see reality’s truth, however much it might rage, white and wild and chaotic as the worst of blizzards. Somewhere, there must be a higher truth beyond the truths that his found-father had taught him, certainly beyond what Old Father and the civilized people of the City could know. Perhaps beyond even the Song of Life. Where he would find this truth, he could not say. He knew only that he must someday look upon the truth of the world, and all the worlds of the universe, and see it for what it really was. He would live for truth – this he promised himself. When truth was finally his, he could come at last to know halla and live at peace with all things.

This sudden, revealed direction of his life’s journey was itself a part of the higher truth that he thought of as fate, and the unlooked-for connectedness between purpose and possibility delighted him. Inside, chaos was woven into the very coil of life, but inside, too, was a new delight in the possibilities of that life. All at once, he felt light and giddy, drunk with possibility. He was no longer afraid of madness; in relief (and in reaction to all the absurdities that had occurred that evening), he began to laugh. The corners of his eyes broke into tens of radiating, upraised lines, and even though he gasped and covered his mouth, he couldn’t stop laughing.

Old Father looked into his eyes, touched his forehead and intoned, ‘Only a madman or a saint could laugh in the face of this kind of personal annihilation.’

‘But … sir,’ Danlo forced out between waves of laughter, ‘you said I must look at myself … without glavering, yes?’

‘Ah ho, but I didn’t think you would succeed so well. Why aren’t you afraid of yourself, as other men are? As bound to yourself?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Did you know that laughing at oneself is the key to escaping the glavering?’

Danlo smiled at Old Father and decided to reveal the story of his birth that Chandra had often repeated. Even though Three-Fingered Soli had told him that Chandra was not his true mother, he liked to believe this story because it seemed to explain so much about himself. Probably, he thought, Chandra had witnessed his birth and altered the story slightly.

‘They say I was born laughing,’ Danlo told Old Father. ‘At my first breath of air, laughing at the cold and the light, instead of crying. I was not I then, I was just a baby, but the natural state, the laughing … if laughter is the sound of my first self, then when I laugh, I return there and everything is possible, yes?’

With one eye closed, Old Father nodded his head painfully. And then he asked, ‘Why did you come to Neverness?’

‘I came to become a pilot,’ Danlo said simply. ‘To make a boat and sail the frozen sea where the stars shine. To find halla. Only at the centre of the Great Circle will I be able to see … the truth of the world.’

Next to Old Father, atop a low, black lacquer table, was a bowl of shraddha seeds, each of which was brownish-red and as large as a man’s knuckle. Old Father reached out to lift the bowl onto his lap. He scooped up a handful of seeds and began eating them one by one.

‘Ah,’ he said as he crunched a seed between his large jaws. ‘You want to make another journey. And such a dangerous one – may I tell you the parable of the Unfulfilled Father’s journey? I think you’ll enjoy this, oh ho! Are you comfortable? Would you like a pillow to sit on?’

‘No, thank you,’ Danlo said.

‘Well, then, ah … long, long ago, on the island of Fravashing’s greatest ocean, it came time for the Unfulfilled Father to leave the place of his birth. All Unfulfilled Fathers, of course, must leave their birth clan and seek the acceptance of a different one, on another island – else the clans would become inbred and it would be impossible for the Fravashi Fathers to learn the wisdom of faraway places. In preparation for his journey, the Unfulfilled Father began to gather up all the shraddha seeds on the island. The First Least Father saw him doing this and took him aside. “Why are you gathering so many seeds?” he asked. “Don’t you know that the Fravashi won’t invent boats for another five million years? Don’t you know that you will have to swim to the island of your new life? How can you swim with ten thousand pounds of seeds?” And the Unfulfilled Father replied, “These shraddha seeds are the only food I know, and I’ll need every one of them when I get to the new island.” At this, the First Least Father whistled at him and said, “Don’t you suppose you will find food on your new island?” And the Unfulfilled Father argued, “But shraddha seeds grow only on this island, and I will starve without them.” Whereupon the First Least Father laughed and said, “But what if this turned out to be a parable and your shraddha seeds were not seeds at all, but rather your basic beliefs?” The Unfulfilled Father told him, “I don’t understand,” and he swam out into the ocean with all his seeds. There he drowned, and sad to say, he never came within sight of his new island.’

Having finished his story, Old Father rather smugly reached into the bowl and placed a shraddha seed into his mouth. And then another, and another after that. He ground up and ate the seeds slowly, though continually, almost without pause. The cracked seeds gave off a bitter, soapy smell that Danlo found repulsive. Old Father told him that it was dangerous for human beings to eat the seeds, which is why he did not offer him any. He told him other things as well. Subtly, choosing his words with care, he began to woo Danlo into the difficult way of the Fravashi philosophy. This was his purpose as a Fravashi Old Father, to seek new students and free them from the crushing, smothering weight of their belief systems. For a good part of the evening, he had listened to Danlo speak, listened for the rhythms, stress syllables, nuances and key words that would betray his mind’s basic prejudices. Each person, of course, as the Fravashi have long ago discovered, acquires a unique repertoire of habits, customs, conceits and beliefs; these conceptual prisons delimit and hold the mind as surely as quick-freezing ice captures a butterfly. It was Old Father’s talent and calling to find the particular word keys that might unlock his students’ mental prisons. ‘That which is made with words, with words can be unmade’ – this was an old Fravashi saying, almost as old as their complex and powerful language, which was very old indeed.

‘Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind,’ Old Father told Danlo. ‘How we hold things in our minds is infinitely more important than what we hold there.’

‘How, then, should I hold the truths of the Song of Life?’

‘That is for you to decide.’

‘You hint that Ayeye, Gauri and Nunki, all the animals of the dreamtime – you hint that they are only symbols of consciousness, yes? The way consciousness inheres in all things?’

‘So, it’s so: it’s possible to see the animals as archetypes or symbols.’

‘But Ahira is my other-self. Truly. When I close my eyes, I can hear him calling me.’

Danlo said this with a smile on his lips. Even though he himself now doubted everything he had ever learned, in the wisdom of his ancestors he still saw many truths. Because he was not quite ready to face the universal chaos with a wholly naked mind (and because he was too strong-willed simply to replace the Alaloi totem system with Old Father’s alien philosophy), he decided to give up no part of this wisdom without cause and contemplation. In some way deeper than that of mere symbol, Ahira was still his other-self; Ahira still called to him when he listened, called him to journey to the stars where he might at last find halla.

‘So many strange words and strange ideas,’ he said. ‘Everything that has happened tonight, so strange.’

‘Aha.’

‘But I must thank you for giving me these strangenesses.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘And I must thank you for taking me into your home and feeding me, although of course I cannot thank you for feeding me shaida meat.’

‘Oh ho! Again you’re welcome – the Alaloi are very polite.’

Danlo brushed his thick hair away from his eyes and asked, ‘Do you know how I might become a pilot and sail from star to star?’

Old Father picked up his empty teacup and held it between his furry hands. ‘To become a pilot you would have to enter the Order. So, it’s so: Neverness, this Unreal City of ours, exists solely to educate an elite of human beings, to initiate them into the Order.’

‘There is a … passage into this Order, yes?’

‘A passage, just so. Boys and girls come from many, many worlds to be pilots. And cetics, programmers, holists and scryers – you can’t yet imagine the varieties of wisdom which exist. Oh ho, but it’s difficult to enter the Order, Danlo. It might be easier to fill an empty cup with tea merely by wishing it so.’

The Fravashi do not like to say a thing is impossible, so he smiled at Danlo and whistled sadly.

‘I must continue my journey,’ Danlo said.

‘There are many journeys one can make. All paths lead to the same place, so the Old Fathers say. If you’d like, you may stay here and study with the other students.’

In the thinking chamber, there was no sound other than the crunching of Old Father’s seeds. While they had talked, the chanting coming from the house’s other rooms had faded out and died.

‘Thank you,’ Danlo said, and he touched the white feather in his hair. ‘Kareeska, grace beyond grace, you’ve been so kind, but I must continue my journey. Is there any way you can help me?’

Old Father whistled a while before saying, ‘In another age, I might have invited you into the Order. Now, the Fravashi have no formal relationship – none! – with the lords and masters who decide who will become pilots and who will not. Still, I have friends in the Order. I have friends, and there is the smallest of chances.’

‘Yes?’

‘Every year, at the end of false winter, there is a competition of sorts. Oh ho, a test! Fifty thousand farsiders come to Neverness in hope of entering the Order. Perhaps sixty of them are chosen for the novitiate. The smallest of chances, Danlo, such a small chance.’

‘But you will help me with this test?’

‘I’ll help you, only …’ Old Father’s eyes were now twin mirrors reflecting Danlo’s courage in the face of blind fate, his verve and optimism, his rare gift for life. But the Fravashi are never content merely to reflect all that is holiest in another. There must always be a place inside for the angslan, the holy pain. ‘I’ll help you, only you must always remember one thing.’

Danlo rubbed his eyes slowly. ‘What thing?’ he asked.

‘It’s not enough to look for the truth, however noble a journey that might be. Oh ho, the truth, it’s never enough, never, never! If you become a pilot, if you journey to the centre of the universe and look out on the stars and the secret truths, if by some miracle you should see the universe for what it is, that is not enough. You must be able to say “yes” to what you see. To all truths. No matter the dread or anguish, to say “yes”. What kind of man or woman could say “yes” in the face of the truth? So, it’s so: I teach you the asarya. He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the universe. Ah, but by what art, what brilliance, what purity of vision? Oh, Danlo, who has the will to become an asarya?’

Old Father began to sing, then, a poignant, rapturous song that made Danlo brood upon fear and fate. After saying good-night, Danlo returned to his room, returned down the long stone hallway to the softness and warmth of his bed, but he could not sleep. He lay awake playing his shakuhachi, thinking of everything that had happened in Old Father’s chamber. To be an asarya, to say ‘yes’ to shaida and halla and the other truths of life – no other idea had ever excited him so much. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, did he, Danlo the Wild, have the will to become an asarya? All night long he played his shakuhachi, and in the breathy strangeness of the music, he thought he could hear the answer, ‘yes’.

CHAPTER FOUR

Shih

The metaphysicians of Tlon view time as being the most illusory of mental constructions. According to one school, the present is formless and undefined, while the future is just present hope, and the past is nothing more than present memory in the minds of men. One school teaches that the universe was created only moments ago (or that it is being eternally created), and all sentient creatures remember with perfect clarity a past that has never been. Still another school has as its fundamental doctrine that the whole of time has already occurred and that our lives are but vague memories in the mind of God.

– from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlon, Vol. MXXVI, page

In truth, Danlo really didn’t know how difficult it is to enter the Order. On the planets of the Civilized Worlds, the Order maintains thousands of elite and lesser schools. The students of the lesser schools vie with one another to enter the elite schools; in the elite schools, there is a vicious struggle to be among the few chosen for the novitiate and the great Academy on Neverness. And so the chosen come to the City of Light, where there is always a sense of being at the centre of things, an immanence of cosmic events and astonishing revelations. In truth, Neverness is the spiritual centre of the most brilliant civilization man has ever known. Who would not desire a lifetime of seeking knowledge and truth in sight of her silvery spires? Who would not relish the excitement, the camaraderie, and above all, the sheer power of being a pilot or high professional of the Order? So esteemed and coveted is this life of the mind (and since the masters of the various disciplines can be brought back to their youthful bodies many times, it can be a very long life indeed) that many ordinary people come to Neverness hoping to bribe or bully their way into the Order. There is of course no hope for these venal souls, but for others, for the thousands of unfortunate girls and boys who grow up on planets too small or obscure to support an elite school, there is the slightest of hopes. As Old Father informed Danlo, each year the masters of the Order hold a competition. And it is not easy to enter the competition, much less to win a place at Borja, which is the first of the Academy’s schools. Petitions must be made. Each boy or girl (or in rare cases, each of the double-sexed) must find a sponsor willing to petition the Master of Novices at Borja. The sponsors must certify their student’s brilliance, character, and most importantly, their desire to enter the novitiate. Each year, more than fifty thousand petitions are received, but only one of seven are accepted. At the end of false winter, when the sun shines hotly and melts the sea ice, perhaps seven thousand of the luckiest youths are permitted to enter this most intense of competitions.

‘Oh ho, I have sponsored you,’ Old Father told Danlo a few days later. ‘I’ve made a petition in your behalf, and we will see what we will see.’

While Danlo awaited the doubtful results of Old Father’s petition – doubtful because Bardo the Just, Master of Novices, was said to resent the Fravashi and any others who taught outside of the Order’s dominion – he busied himself learning the thousands of skills necessary to negotiate the strange streets and even stranger ways of the city called Neverness. During the evenings, Fayeth began the painful task of teaching him the Language of the Civilized Worlds. And every morning, when the air was clean and brisk, the black man who had first dubbed him ‘Danlo the Wild’ taught him to ice skate. Luister Ottah, who was as thin and dark (and quick) as a raven, took Danlo out on the icy streets. He showed him how to stroke with his skates and hold an even edge; he showed him how to execute a hokkee stop by jumping in a tight little quarter circle and digging his steel blades into the ice. Danlo took to this exhilarating sport immediately. (Although Danlo thought it only natural that the City streets should be made of ice, the glissades and slidderies, as they are called, are the wonder – and consternation – of all who visit Neverness.) He spent long afternoons racing up and down the streets of the Fravashi District, savouring the sensations of his new life. The hot yellow sun, the cool wind, the cascade of scurfed-off ice whenever he ground to a sudden stop – he loved the touch of the world. He loved the sting of the soreesh snow that fell every third or fourth day; he loved the eave swallows who roosted atop the round houses; he loved their warbling, their shiny orange bills, even the chalky smell of their spattered white droppings. These things were real, and he grasped for the reality of the world as a baby grasps his mother’s long, flowing hair.

Other things seemed less real. The ecology of the City made no sense to him at all. Who made his furs and that remarkable device called a zipper by which he closed and fastened his parka? Where did his food come from? Old Father had said that the grains and nuts he ate for his meals grew in factories to the south of Neverness. Every morning, sleds laden with food rocketed up and down the streets. Danlo had seen these sleds. They were not, of course, real sleds pulled by dogs. They were brightly coloured clary shells mounted on steel runners. Rhythmic jets of flame and burning air pushed the sleds across the ice. The sight of these sleek, fiery monsters terrified him, at least at first. (And he was quite confused by the harijan men who operated the sleds laden with cast-off clothing, with broken vases and sulki grids and ruined furniture, and with pieces of half-eaten food. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to accomplish such labour. Old Father explained this puzzle with typical Fravashi humour. He said that human beings had invented civilization in order to develop a class of people low enough to handle other people’s rubbish.) After a while, Danlo’s terror softened to wonder, and wonder became profound doubt: what if the sleds turned against their human masters and refused to bear their loads? Or what if a storm, a vicious sarsara, destroyed the factories, whatever factories really were? How would the city people eat? There could not be enough animals in the world to feed so many people – would they eat each other? Was it possible they didn’t know it was shaida for human beings to hunt one another?

Because Danlo would not eat the factories’ cultured meats but still had a taste for shagshay or silk belly or fish, sometimes he would cross to the district’s edge and steal into the woods of the City Wild. And he hunted. There, among the flowing streams and yu trees, he found a small herd of shagshay. With their fuzzy false winter antlers and their dark, trusting eyes, they were not quite civilized, but neither were they completely wild. It was too easy to kill them. He stripped the bark from a limb of black shatterwood, carved it, and mounted the long flint spearpoint that he had secreted inside his furs. (His old spear shaft he had to leave at Old Father’s house because it was illegal to carry weapons through the City.) On two different days he killed two fawns and ten sleekits before deciding that there weren’t enough animals in the City Wild for him to hunt. He froze part of the meat and ate the shagshay’s tenderloin raw. He did not want to build a fire. Too many paths wound through the woods; too many people from the surrounding districts took their exercise skating there. It was not illegal to hunt animals within the City, but Danlo didn’t know this. There was no law against hunting or cutting trees only because no one had ever thought that such a law would be necessary. He sensed, however, that the insane people would be disgusted by his killing animals for food, much as he dreaded the thought of eating shaida meat that wasn’t real. In the end, after many days of surreptitious feasting in the yu trees, he decided that he would eat neither cultured meats nor animals. He would follow Old Father’s example. Grains, nuts, pulses, and fruit – henceforth these kinds of plant life would be his only food.

Perhaps the most unreal thing about his new life were the people of the City themselves. With their many-coloured skins and differently shaped noses, lips, and brows, they looked much like demons out of a nightmare, and he often wondered if they had real spirits as real people do. He passed them every day on the streets, and he wondered at their peculiar stiffness and weakness of limb. They seemed so hurried and aloof, and abstract, as if their thoughts were as insubstantial as smoke. Could it be that they weren’t really there at all, not really living in the moment? Their faces were so ugly with wants and fears and urgency, so very ugly and hard to read. What must they think of him, with his white feather and his wind-whipped hair? In truth, no one bothered to notice him at all. It was as if they couldn’t see him, couldn’t perceive his curiosity, his loneliness, and his uncivilized spirit. Usually, he was dressed much as an Alaloi (in new, white furs that Old Father had given him), but so were many other people. And many were dressed much more colourfully. Autists, neurosingers, cetics, harijan and whores – people of many different sects and professions every day passed through the district. And the clothes they wore! Red robes, emerald sweaters and furs of every colour. Journeymen holists skated by in cobalt kamelaikas. He saw jewelled, satin jackets, cottons and woollens, and kimonos woven of a material called silk. Much of this clothing was beautiful, in a gaudy, overwhelming way. It was hard to continually take in such beauty. After a while, he tired of looking at fabricated things; he felt sick and too full, as if he had eaten eight bowls of overripe yu berries. He invented a word for the different beauties of the City: shona-manse, the beauty that man makes with his hands. It was not a deep beauty. Nor was it a various beauty, despite the many hues and textures of manmade things. In a single chunk of granite, with its millions of pink and black flecks of quartz, mica and silicates, there was more complexity and variety than in the loveliest kimono. It was true that most of the buildings – the glory of Neverness! – were faced with granite, basalt, and other natural rocks. When Danlo looked eastward toward the Old City, the obsidian spires glittered silver-black. And, yes, it was beautiful, but it was a dazzling, too-perfect beauty. No single spire possessed a mountain’s undulations or its intricate and subtle pattern of trees, rock, snow and ice. And the City itself was ill-balanced and unalive compared to the beauty of the world. Where, in such an unreal place, could he hope to find halla? A few times, at night, he sneaked out of Old Father’s house to gaze at the stars. But everywhere he looked the city spires were outlined black against the sky. He could see only the supernovae, Nonablinka and Shurablinka, and the enigmatic Golden Flower; the hideous glowing haze of a million city lights devoured the other stars. Oh, blessed God, he thought, why must the people of the City place so many things between themselves and the world?